I was just thinking last night... there's something odd about reading Gore Vidal while waiting for your latest super-military-kill-the-ruskies game to load.

But if I stopped playing video games that simulate violent military confrontation, in a way I would still be a hypocrite, because I would be being untrue to myself and my love of such games! (Yeah! That's it!) Plus it would be taking moving pixels around way too seriously to quit because of some crazy nebulous thing like "principles"...

And thus all of philosophy is proven to be just post-hoc justification for our already predetermined (and sometimes akrasiatic) action.

........

Speaking of acting crazy, Cat Power! Especially loved the nervous-voiced and rambling recount of persecution by hotel employees but it was okay at the end because she worked her way from the, the guy that cleans the pool and the fuckin' Mexicans all the way up to the guy at the desk and how she CRUSHED them! Crushed them with kindness and they were all on her side afterwards.

Huh?

She reminded me of some super-talented people I have known that I have regretted inviting to parties. You could feel the unstable ground that her persona was built on shifting, quaking like her voice, and you knew she would end up asking for money or a ride home at four in the morning.

Aside from that, or perhaps because of it, the show was by turns extraordinarily rich with the barely concealed emotions of an ex-lover's confessions, and strange, distant and alien as the hand of a stranger in a prison cell.

She seemed at times to not want to be understood or even heard, but just to sing to herself bits of anything that came to mind. But these snippets were given to us on the super expensive silver platter lined with velvet of her voice. One part Janice, two parts Nina Simone.

Songs included "Boom, Boom, Boom" by the Hook, "Wolf Among Men" by Prince Billy, and the fragments of many others from Motown and from her own book, as well as a song she wrote a couple of weeks ago after being persecuted by some hotel staff that she had to win over and crush with kindness but finally she got all these flowers. Beautiful pink flowers.